If you heard about the little rally in downtown Vancouver on the weekend, the one where the newest voice of an outraged generation, Eveline Xia, told a few hundred protesters that she #donthave1million and therefore can’t afford to live in Vancouver, then you might be asking yourself these questions:

When are Xia and her placarded Generation Squeeze pals going to grow up?

How, exactly, does a city control the cost of housing in a free enterprise and increasingly global market?

And how is this situation any different than it was a 30 or 40 years ago for young people looking to own homes in Vancouver?

First, let’s put the rally in perspective. More people show up for a Lululemon outlet sale. Thousands more Vancouverites apparently care a lot more about legalizing pot. And, let’s face, the crowd count is larger outside the Apple store every time a new smartphone hits the sales floor.

Which isn’t to say housing affordability in Vancouver isn’t a hot-button issue.

But it was ever thus.

Most home buyers looking to live in, or wanting to come to, Vancouver — be they young, old, middle-class, professional, retired, single, family-oriented — have long been priced out of the city’s housing market, where these days you need at least $1 million to take possession of an east-side teardown.

It’s a story that’s also being told in other big livable cities around the world, “hedge” cities like London, Singapore, Sydney, San Francisco and New York.

Like it or not, housing is the new global gold, a coveted commodity, and Vancouver is a 24-karat investment.

And so price tags have risen out of reach and we are in the midst of a frenzy.

But it was ever thus.

There have always been barriers to getting into Vancouver’s housing market. International and domestic immigrants with cash. Minimum wages and double-digit interest rates. Leaky condos.

These were factors facing many of us, also born and raised in Vancouver, who were priced out of our childhood neighbourhoods 30 and 40 years ago.

We, too, were once the young generation, just out of university, paying student loans, trying to launch a career. We, too, wanted to get married, and raise a family in a nice house with a fence for the kids and the dog.

We didn’t have indulgent parents, mind you, but instead were raised by hard-working frugal folks whose memories of the Depression formed their economic view of life, and thus ours. We weren’t coddled and indulged, or raised to think the world owed us a living.

And we sure didn’t bitch and moan when the lawyers and doctors and other nouveau riche of the day (replaced by a new economic bogey man, the one percenters) were buying up much of the real estate west of Main Street.

We didn’t accuse them of artificially inflating real estate value, or pricing us out of the market, or flipping, or speculating, even though that is exactly what was happening.

And we didn’t expect the government to solve the problem, or soften the blow for us.

Instead, we took a hard look at our income and our debt capabilities and then read the real estate listings and then said to ourselves, “Oh dear, guess there’s no point going to that open house for that pretty bungalow in Dunbar because we can’t afford it any way.”

Most of us, in case you haven’t noticed the size of the suburbs, vacated paradise and settled for a home beyond Boundary Road.

We went where we could afford to go, which was nowhere near where our parents lived or anywhere near where we worked.

So, sure, exhort Vancouver city council to impose a foreign investment (speculation) tax, or levy a vacant house (flipping) tax, and good luck with that.

It will make a marginal difference at best, given that offshore investors represent a minority of buyers, and it will require a new bureaucracy that will be difficult to monitor or enforce because no one keeps track of flippers and investors.

And such an undertaking will rightly carry racists overtones if the taxes are applicable only to offshore (read Asian) buyers and not to B.C. residents and developers who are also speculators and flippers.

You can’t afford to live in Vancouver?

Stop your entitled whining. Get a better education and job. Save your money. Lower your expectations. Make sacrifices. Just like the generations did before you.

And, yes, much as it raises hackles to hear it, move. No one owes you a home in the big city, no one is obliged to provide you with a million-dollar property on your beer budget.